Richard Cock could have been an Eastern Cape dairy farmer.
Thankfully, his bucolic ambitions where scuppered when he was doing matric by the sale of the family farm and as a result SA benefited from a different kind of production process — his prolific musical output.
With the shelving of his dreams of raising pigs (animals he is particularly fond of) and milking cows, he took the serendipitous advice of the head of music who could see his raw talent and suggested music as an alternative course of study.
It was obviously the right call, because his nascent talent and single-minded obsession have buoyed an entire life in music.
The lives of multiple generations of South Africans have been profoundly touched and moved by Richard's choral and orchestral extravaganzas. I was first exposed to his particular brand of super enthusiastic conducting as a young primary school girl, and my own daughter has followed suit singing in his school choir concerts.
He is nothing if not consistent, and each of the concerts are sprinkled with the fairy dust that makes them wonderfully educational and infectiously joyous affairs.
For many children and their adults these ebullient concerts stand out as their first glorious entry into the world of “serious” music. In Richard’s handling, music is anything but serious, it is exuberant, life enhancing and always an opportunity for a teaching moment as you may have experienced at Starlight Classics, or any of his many other entertainments.
We meet in his hood. He is the consummate local, he has lived in Parkhurst for almost as long as he has been married — 38 years.
He remembers the street when it had only one restaurant and a slew of antique shops. Today Parkhurst is serving bright summer vibes that seem geared to underscore Richard’s sunny disposition.
He chooses Nice for our lunch — I won’t make any cheesy allusions as to why there could be no other suitable venue, other than to state that niceness is the virtue that comes off Richard in waves. Plus Nice is a Parkhurst staple, a charming café with a strong line in pie and very good breakfasts. It is what it says on the box, nice, very nice.
I have been reading Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which presents the world’s pre-eminent trauma psychologist’s findings on post-traumatic stress disorder and how to treat it.
Singing, it seems, both alone and together in choirs, is the answer. At least one of the very good ones. Richard agrees wholeheartedly — and he should know. Among all his projects, he runs two professional choirs: The Chanticleer singers (the leading chamber choir in SA) and the Symphony Choir of Johannesburg which is celebrating its 40th anniversary later today with a concert at the Linder Auditorium.
He assures me it will be a marvellous, rollicking affair with a full orchestra and really impressive soloists busting out big-hearted popular hits that have moved SA collectively over the past 40 years along with gutsy renditions of more elevated material. And you can still buy tickets for the 3pm performance (I just had to throw a little punt in).
“Singing is very good for you physically, it definitely releases endorphins,” he says. “I’ve experienced this with my choirs where people come for rehearsal at the end of a day’s work, we rehearse from 7.30pm and by 9pm they’re all on a high and they leave all pumped up.”
Singing is very good for you physically, it definitely releases endorphins
He must have something to do with the lifting of the spirits of his choristers? “There is something to how you run the rehearsal, the energising you do as a conductor to get people fired up. Like last night we had a fantastic rehearsal with the symphony choir for the concert.
One of the great uniting experiences in South Africa is the choral tradition and its ability to resonate across all communities, and Richard has been at the forefront of that musically uniting impulse.
“One of my great memories was the Massed Choir Festival, which we started in 1989 with my good friend Mzilikazi Khumalo. We were brought together by the then editor of the Sowetan, Aggrey Klaaste, who wanted to do a mass choir festival to bring people together and to restore some of the things that had been destroyed by apartheid as part of his nation-building project.
“His staff thought he was crackers, because people forget that in 1989 the country was in flames and we used to endure the most terrible stuff as we went around the country rehearsing. We decided right at the beginning to have 20 choirs and more than 1,000 singers and an orchestra at the Standard Bank Arena. It was just incredible, and we did it for 17 years. I retired shortly after Mzilikazi retired.
“I mean I retired from that, I haven’t retired from everything else. I don’t think I can see retirement in my near future. There’s still a lot to be done, and music goes on being a uniting factor in the country and I am so happy to be a part of that.”
I wonder what he has understood about the nature of music after a lifetime in its service?
“A friend of ours was the sub-organist at Westminster Abbey and he got Alzheimer’s. He had no idea where or who he was, but he could sit down at the organ and play. That is the amazing power of music. I think what drives me is a desire to share my love for music and what I do with and for other people. It is literally a sort of altruistic sharing of what I really love.
“There really is a spirit of hopefulness and love in South Africa which will get us through all the crises that we face. I think my little part in it is through music, that I can bring people together and bring joy and happiness to them. That’s my mission.”
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